Album Review: Cigarettes After Sex - Cry (2019)

I can scarcely believe I loved the first Cigarettes After Sex album as much as I did. The 2017 debut held enough appeal for me to name it one of the blog’s best albums of that year, and it had enough going for it to convince me to travel all the way up to Auckland for the band’s Powerstation gig of early 2018. Two years on, after listening to the band’s follow-up album, Cry, I’m really struggling to recall what might have possessed me.

There’s no question that Cigarettes After Sex make fastidiously crafted, dark and dreamy pop music, with exquisite, immaculately presented melodies right at the core of everything. All things that usually appeal to your pop-loving blogger. But Cry feels like a pale replica of that debut, and there is very little to distinguish it from album number one, save for the fact that it’s not nearly as convincing, fresh, or clever in its intent or execution. 

Cry offers us the same old formula, the same old guitar effects, the same old melodies - albeit, admittedly, many of them are things of great beauty - and the once hauntingly unique androgynous vocals of Greg Gonzalez now just come across as being repetitive and tiresome. Even a little bit creepy in places. The songs deal with break up, longing, loss, sex, and unrequited love. Perfect fare for the angsty post-pubescent mass that accounts for a good portion of the band’s fanbase.

So perhaps that’s the problem I have with it? Not fitting the demographic for which its intended. Or perhaps something has changed with me over the past two years? I’ve become overly cynical … I’m certainly less tolerant of Cigarettes After Sex, and the only sense of longing I’m now feeling is a desire for the band to tone down the “mellow” and turn up the rock n roll. 

Or maybe I just wanted the band to show some sign, any sign, of innovation and progression on the follow-up? I don’t think that’s an unreasonable expectation, but the truth is, Cry holds very little appeal and it’s all a little bit too saccharine and sterile (musically) for my taste – even though some of its no-filter lyrics are the polar opposite of that description … see “a little bit creepy”, above. 

Not that Gonzalez and co would care less about what the likes of me think about their art. They’ve got their audience, and their formula. What worked last time out will just as likely work this time around, and they clearly have no need to turn things up beyond the tried and trusted. Suffice to say though, for all that the debut briefly appealed as something very special, very much for and of its time, the all-too-familiar younger sibling, Cry, won’t even get close to making this blog’s shortlist for album of the year in 2019.